Spiritual Care of Palliative Care Patients

Book Title: Spirituality –The Heart of Nursing

Chapter 9: Spiritual Care of Palliative Care Patients

Description:

This chapter identifies the four spiritual needs, because an understanding of the spiritual needs is important if nurses are to attempt to address these needs; and, secondly, presents examples of how spiritual care is delivered by Registered Nurses (RNs) to their palliative care patients. It is hoped that through their examples and by clarification of the skills that are involved more RNs will begin to address their patients' spiritual needs. The skills and spiritual needs addressed in these examples are not unique to palliative care patients; they can be applied to all categories of patients as all patients can experience, albeit from a differing perspective, one or more of the four spiritual needs whilst requiring the assistance of the nursing profession.

Topics:

• Spiritual needs
  • Search for meaning
  • Sense of forgiveness
  • Need for love
  • Hope
• Providing spiritual care
  • Assessing and diagnosing
  • Planning and implementation
  • Evaluation
• Conclusion
• References

Author:

Brigitte Van Heere

BN (HONOURS), BSc, RN

This chapter is a reflection of the research that Brigitte van Heere undertook as part of the Bachelor of Nursing (Honours) program, under the supervision of Anne Fry, Senior Lecturer in Mental Health Nursing at the University of Western Sydney — Nepean. The research was started after Brigitte finished her Bachelor of Nursing.

Brigitte found that the course constantly reiterated the need to provide holistic nursing care, but there seemed to be a lack of information on how to deal with the spiritual needs of a patient. This lead to the development of such questions in her mind as: 'How am I supposed to care for the spiritual needs of my patients?' and 'How do other nurses look after their patients' spiritual needs?' With these questions running through her mind, she began to look into how nurses attended to their patients' spiritual needs. While conducting this research she worked full time as a registered nurse. At present she is working full time in the Intensive Care/Coronary Care Unit at Campbelltown Hospital in New South Wales.

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